An American Feast

One

Inside of me there are two dogs. One is mean and evil and the other is good and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins I answer, the one I feed the most…

—Sitting Bull, Lakota Holy Man, American

1971… The acid was finally kicking in and I had no idea what I’d done with my clothes. I hadn’t thought so far ahead to realize I’d need them to get home and I was now completely naked, smack dab in the middle of Washington, DC’s Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. I looked down the expanse, over the sea of hippies and then up at the memorial and noticed that Abraham Lincoln and the marble structure that housed him, now seemed entirely composed of countless writhing maggots. Marijuana, teargas and revolution were in the air and three angry cops, wearing gas masks and swinging riot batons, were coming for me.

Childlike and innocent, strangely at peace, yet terrified, my mind raced with every emotion. I backed away, splashing through the water that was up to my knees, almost making a game of it. The one that was closest to me seemed the immediate threat, I watched him slipping and falling into the water, his frustration and mounting anger were now evident. It seemed ludicrous to me that he somehow intended to take my freedom, as if one human should hold that power over another, simply because he wore a badge, a badge that now seemed to be melting before my eyes like a candle that burned too hot, dripping profusely down his front and I knew that if I waited that out, he’d have no more authority. So I kept my eyes fixed on that badge as I danced away from him, smiling, amused at his anger.

Twelve thousand of us were arrested that day, the largest mass arrest in US history, and the irony wasn’t lost on me that I was tear-gassed, tackled, beaten and arrested in the shadow of two monuments that had been erected to celebrate freedom.

You see, there were two revolutions going on at that time. One that involved the most oppressed of our people, the poor and black of the inner cities, in a race war centered upon equal rights and dignity. That revolution was on their own turf, affecting them directly, but the other revolution for the more untouchable and coddled of us, was over a remote war that was nine thousand miles away. Sure, I cared about and supported their fight but this one was more my style. After all, I came armed with a factory-installed semi-affluent upper middle class mindset that told me that nothing could hurt me. I cared about this cause, but honestly speaking, I was mostly there for the party… How exactly did I become a member in good standing in the spoiled white revolt?

I’ll get to that.

The great Mark Twain once said, Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. I feel the same way. It won’t do any good to call me a liar, any more than he was, for I am a storyteller and that is something born of circular embellishments… I’ll only say that this is my story…as I remember it…but one that is impossible to tell without telling another bigger story through which it is irretrievably entwined, entangled and filtered. This is also the story of America…my America…and THAT is a sordid tale of poisons that seep in through the cracks, of shattered dreams and broken promises. It is the story of patriots and it is the story of traitors…about sinners and saints, and ordinary people that just try to do the right thing, to make a difference in small ways against impossible odds while watching helplessly as America went completely off the rails. Like struggling to bail water from the hull of a sinking Titanic, with just a thimble… It is because of them that this book is ultimately about hope.

On May 1, 1971, I extended my arms, one hand holding a US Marine Corps Zippo lighter, that had belonged to my war hero father, and the other holding a little paper card, through the big iron fence separating me from the South Lawn of the White House. I set fire to my draft card. Holding it aloft, hoping the president would see it burning, I dropped it, and it fluttered down in flames right onto Richard Nixon’s lawn.

It turns out that Nixon hadn’t even been there but he was still calling the shots. Calling them from the relative safety and solitude of his home in San Clemente, California… We just assumed he was at the White House.

After torching my card, I then stepped back, and disappeared, into the rabble of angry hippies…and when you are one of a crowd of thirty thousand, a number that would grow larger over the next two days, there is some safety in numbers.

I made my way across the Ellipse, and toward West Potomac Park where many of us would camp for the night and where there was a stage set up with planned musical performances and speakers lined up. Having grown up in Washington, during the 1960s, and being the right age and with the right sensibilities, I’d been involved in many smaller antiwar demonstrations, but this one was the mother of them all…the Mayday Demonstration… Organized by Rennie Davis, one of the Chicago 7, and his organization, the War Resisters League, and the Youth International Party, the Yippies, the more militant prankster faction of the movement, this was to be one big rodeo.

We were all there for the largest act of peaceful, nonviolent disobedience in US history and the plan was to shut down Washington. If the government wouldn’t stop the war, we were going to disrupt the city, blockade all the bridges and traffic circles, making it impossible for the government to function.

In response, Army troop transports flew in from all over the East Coast and soon there were soldiers lining both sides of every bridge coming in to the city and guarding every major intersection around Capitol Hill. As President Nixon watched from the safety of San Clemente, three thousand miles away, US Marines, in one helicopter after another, thirty per hour, landed on the grounds of the Washington Monument to augment the completely overwhelmed Capitol Police, and help to contain us.

Nixon, from his distant perch, had already given the order to have the permit to assemble revoked, an hour before, and the fact that the music of the era was a galvanizing force in this, the Antiwar effort, just as it had been in the Civil Rights movement, was not lost on this administration. On the stage, Rennie Davis had just given an incendiary speech and introduced Joan Baez, who spoke briefly and then performed one of her poignant antiwar songs, and then she brought out Bob Dylan, for a three songs. By then, low-flying helicopters were swooping in over us, and the Yippies, in response, began to release hundreds of helium filled weather balloons, with long tethers sure to snarl the rotors, to foil them.

At that point, Nixon ordered the power cut to the main stage. By now, a phalanx of soldiers, National Guardsmen, and police in riot gear had surrounded us and were poised to strike.

But they’d wait until morning.

I’d been up all night. I knew they would be coming, but at the first light of morning, I took my first hit of acid, anyway. One hour later I decided that it just wasn’t working so I took two more hits, more or less, and that is when all hell broke loose. Suddenly and without warning, we were under attack… Capitol Police, US Army soldiers and National Guardsmen, hundreds of them swept in all at once, tearing down tents of sleeping protesters, destroying the stage and chasing us out of West Potomac Park. Bounded by the Potomac River on one side, there was nowhere to go except across Independence Avenue toward the Lincoln Memorial and the Reflecting Pool, and that was where they contained and surrounded us. We were collectively, both too stoned and idealistic to realize the party was over. So while they were bringing in dozens upon dozens of busses to take us away, we did what any large group of hippies would do. We partied until they came for us. We were all taken to a large football field next to DC Stadium, where they’d set up eight-foot fencing all around, as the DC jails weren’t quite big enough to hold everybody.

It was my first arrest but it wouldn’t be my last. I would work with the Yippies twenty years later in San Francisco… But I’ll get to that, too.

Two

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

From beginning to end, life is nothing, if not a near-death experience. A savage run of close calls, near misses, and missed opportunities…but if we’re lucky, second chances.

My generation? We had it all. We were the spoiled sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation…and what a tall shadow they cast.

It was they that had survived the Great Depression and the Second World War and they were the generation that never saw a nickel until their war ended and suddenly they had a dollar. They bought cars and homes in the suburbs, homes with the latest appliances… And us?… We had our teeth fixed, and our educations seemed assured. We had a better chance of survival than any American generation, before or since, certainly more than any child of the Third World. We were Americans, but that came at a price.

We had an implied contract, an unspoken obligation, and a responsibility to make a difference that comes from having been born into every advantage. After all, we were the best, we were the brightest, we had the means to make an impact, and with that comes a duty not to be shrugged off.

But then the clear cutting began, the feeling of a generation, as Nixon’s war cut a great swath right through us. Twenty years later I would watch again as AIDS cut us down…and drugs… heroin…the best of us lost, the talent squandered, and for all time.

But Vietnam, that was my first inkling that, even for us, life was tenuous…there were no guarantees. I managed to dodge both the draft and the bullets of Vietnam, but many of my peers did not… They weren’t so lucky.

On the day I graduated from high school, May 20, 1970, the War in Vietnam seemed a world away from me, a universe away. It was something that was on television…and it was fucking nine thousand miles away. But on that day, my world seemed limitless. I didn’t know it yet, but I had one foot still planted in the coddled security of my youth, and the other poised to step right off the edge into an uncertain future.

Vietnam seemed so remote.

On that day, the day I graduated, my only care was which parties I would attend that night, but a world away, young Army Captain Dale Robert Shack was fighting for his life. Ten miles from the Laotian border, a sniper’s bullet from an AK-47 ripped through Captain Shack’s leg, coming close to blowing it completely off.

As Shack recalls it, I was standing right next to one of my men, when we were moving toward the bunker. Suddenly heard something, and all I saw were three spurts of blood burst out of his side. I knew we couldn’t save him. My medic was shot and so were two other men. Ritchie was dead. Peter was dead. Randy was dead. I ran around, simultaneously firing at the bunker and patching up my company commander, my medic, and one of my squad leaders. I remember being thankful that half my platoon was down in the valley guarding the tanks. My focus was back on the bunker. I turned toward it and a red hot sledgehammer hit me hard and I was down on my face. A bullet does feel like a hot sledgehammer. I then regained focus. I had two rifles, I had my wounded squad leaders rifle, an M-14 and my M-16. A young medic came up from the armored platoon and started to wrap up my leg. A shot rang out, and somehow my new medic got shot in the side. I still had some gauze pads, I put my hand on him, and realized he’d been hit worse than I thought. My hand went right into his side. I stuffed all the gauze pads into the opening. I threw a grenade over to my only sergeant left who was uninjured. Phred ran up to the bunker and threw the grenade right on top of the shooter. The VC guy wasn’t replaced for a while and the guy from the Armored unit that bandaged my leg was to die.

I was about fifteen feet from a flat bunker on a plateau. The enemy shooter was using an AK-47. I got shot in the right leg, four inches below the knee. It went diagonally through and smashed the femur and the tibia, blowing the lower part of the leg apart. The impact was incredible. I fell down flat on my face, dirt got in the gaping wound, which bled a lot, but I was lucky, no arteries seemed open, maybe they were cauterized by the heat of the bullet. A North Vietnamese Army pay officer was shooting at me from behind a tree. I fired a vertical burst along the edge of the tree. It sliced him in half. As the medi-vac chopper took off, I saw a fifty-one-caliber NVA machine gun on top of the hill next to the plateau we had been on. I yelled to the pilot about the machine gun and he dove down to the rice paddy, his skids just above it. If that machine gun had been manned, we’d all be dead, but no shots came from the hill.

He never expected to survive, nor did he imagine that the war would last that long when he was drafted into the Army, certainly not as long as it would take to complete Officers Candidate School. He fully believed it was about to end but of course it dragged on for years. Shack, caught up in the middle of it, would never be the same, plagued for life with PTSD and a litany of physical and mental repercussions. But he did survive, and when he returned home, he believed that it had been not only a mistake, an unjust war, but that the President Richard Nixon was a war criminal who deserved imprisonment.

Over time and with therapy, Shack was able channel his energies into recovery, while building a successful career. He chose to work politically, at first on the presidential campaign of George McGovern, during which he met his future wife, Joan, who would become the love of his life and the mother of his child. Neither of them ever stopped believing that there could be a better world and they would actively and instrumentally work to elect both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, having occasion to meet them both.

America is now facing a great divide. The people are pitted against one another in a way not seen since the Vietnam era, and it seems to be by design. The Trump White House has a stranglehold on our sense of human decency and seems almost giddy in the elimination of our most basic rights and privileges. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have taken the lead as they easily outrun the most unqualified jockey in the race, Donald J. Trump, and it looks like we are doomed. To people that give up…to Dale Shack and to me, it only means there is work to be done.

This man deserves a Congressional Medal of Honor. Though he has never put in for one, there is no question that he would qualify. His VA representative in Florida suggested it, considered it a miscarriage of recognition, aware of the fact that Captain Shack not only saved the lives of five of his men, in spite of his own grave injuries, yet continued to engage the enemy. The only question now, in light of how he felt about Nixon, is how he would feel shaking the hand of a president who not only avoided military service but has said that he has no respect for captured soldiers, referring to them as losers.

I understand how Captain Shack, fifty years later, might feel he owes nothing to anyone, but even so, his ingrained sense of obligation to make a difference drove his entire life. I consider him worthy of inclusion in any book about America, any truthful book about my generation, because he is someone who survived insurmountable odds and went forward devoting his life to making a difference for the greater good.

Born in Canada, he embodies the best of his adoptive America. We can be proud of him for that…

Three

America, where are you now

Don’t you care about your sons and daughters, Don’t you know we need you now

We can’t fight alone against the monster. There’s a monster on the loose

It’s got our heads into a noose

And it sits there, watching."

—Monster, Steppenwolf

The Chinese have a centuries-old expression, May you live in interesting times. It is considered a curse, something they would have said to an enemy. Interesting times?… I would have them in spades and I wouldn’t trade mine for the world, yet at the point in time in which I have chosen to start this story, Richard Nixon held the highest office in the land and that wasn’t good. He was the embodiment of all that I considered treasonous. In my mind, Nixon was evil personified, the deadly nightshade to world peace, human rights, the poor and the powerless. Interesting times?… That’s a curse?… I would have gone with may you be ruled by swine.

I, on the other hand, was a good boy and a good American. I still know all the words to the Pledge of Allegiance and like most schoolchildren from coast to coast, I would put my hand over my heart and mindlessly,